From London, now living in the Santa Cruz mountains.
Paul Crowley
Karma: 15,169
A survey of anti-cryonics writing
A one-question Turing test for GPT-3
Elon Musk donates $10M to the Future of Life Institute to keep AI beneficial
Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics
Bill Gates: problem of strong AI with conflicting goals “very worthy of study and time”
How accurate is the quantum physics sequence?
How theism works
An EPub of Eliezer’s blog posts
A diagram for a simple two-player game
“IN CASE OF UNFRIENDLY AI, IT IS TOO LATE TO BREAK GLASS”
I love this response. “No, I urinate on other people’s rugs; see my previous urination history. Clearly I thought it worth the slight risk it might descend into boring conversation about who should urinate where.”
Not precommitting to be on my own before making a major life decision.
I once bought something in an New York shop through high-pressure sales. I looked at it and said something about how I would like to have it but I couldn’t nearly afford it, and he asked me how much I would pay for it. Foolishly, I named a price; he looked insulted and said that it was far too low. I tried to explain that that was what I meant, that I couldn’t afford it at any reasonable price, but he skilfully turned it into haggling, and I walked out with the thing and considerably poorer. I then resolved never to buy anything expensive without leaving the shop first, so I could just walk off if I changed my mind.
Many years later, I met up with my girlfriend’s girlfriend for dinner and drinks so we could discuss whether it would work for her to move in with us. There were a lot of warning signs that it wouldn’t, to say the least. I pressed her on things that were worrying me, and got wholly unsatisfactory answers. But we very often had good and enjoyable conversations, and this was one of those times. So at the end she sort of said “OK, that’s all great, shall we announce online that I’m moving in?” and it wasn’t easy to say no. The result was very costly for all of us; it was definitely the biggest and most predictable mistake of my last decade.
Going into such a conversation another time, I’d have said well in advance that I wouldn’t be making any decisions until the next day, when I was on my own. I think there’s every chance that that simple precaution would have saved untold suffering and money for all concerned.
News flash, dearies: there’s lots of areas of life that aren’t ‘science’ where people do tend to get a mite hung up on particulars of what is and is not, in fact, true. Like in bookkeeping. Like in criminal investigations. Like when they’re trying to establish where their spouse was last night.
Like, in fact, in most facets of life, hundreds of times a day, even if accounting isn’t your field and you’re not the accused at a criminal trial, and you’re not even married. Getting the facts right isn’t a concern of ‘science’, specifically. It’s a general concern of human beings. Getting reality right is, frequently, indeed, rather important if you wish to stay alive. It’s not a particularly academic question whether the car is or is not coming, when you cross the road. It’s the sort of thing one likes to get right. And we don’t generally call this ‘science’, either. We call it ‘looking’.
-- AJ Milne
The Ideological Turing Test
Beware of WEIRD psychological samples
I surveyed.
COMPLAIN! I have one partner but I’m definitely not monogamous. Sorry :)
I like it, but I couldn’t really say that the belief that terrorists hate our freedom led to a great increase in freedom.
Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute’s Scary Idea (and Why I Don’t Buy It)
“Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.”—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
In this community, agreeing with a poster such as yourself signals me as sycophantic and weak-minded; disagreement signals my independence and courage. There’s also a sense that “there are leaders and followers in this world, and obviously just getting behind the program is no task for so great a mind as mine”.
However, that’s not the only reason I might hesitate to post my agreement; I might prefer only to post when I have something to add, which would more usually be disagreement. Since I don’t only vote up things I agree with, perhaps I should start hacking on the feature that allows you to say “6 members marked their broad agreement with this point (click for list of members)”.